skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a principle at work that true marketers use to their advantage. It's quite simple, and is avoided all too often, especially by detail-oriented people who operate a little bit differently than non-detail-oriented people. I assume that HackerNews has a lot of engineers who are by nature detail oriented, and therefore this principle is ignored far too often.

The post that converted at the better rate had a link MeetingBurner in the first paragraph (above the fold, as we like to jargon-ize it).

People don't really read things online, they scan. some things jump out, and only if you're very intrigued will you actually read the individual words. In fact, very few of you will even get to this line that I'm writing. The chances that you'll read each line decreases exponentially.

Note that I've made all of my main points in the first sentences of what I've written. Did you even read everything, or did you just scan through and pick up on a few words? The attention paid to each line decreases exponentially as you continue.
MS begins guerrilla marketing campaign for Surface near Chicago Apple Store
T-Mobile and MetroPCS: A match in LTE heaven
It's not about anonymity - they have a verified phone number and email address, they have my address and name. My payment is in the form of a check sent to the address being rented, paid to the name on the account. When I created the account, if they had said "We need a credit card number to confirm your identity" or "Use this secure form to submit a copy of utility bill" I would have gladly complied.

Asking me to send them over email after a reservation is much more frustrating. Not responding for two weeks when I do email them a photo of utility bill is more frustrating still.
"key engages pins in lock" is missing some steps - like the atoms push against each other and stuff...

Why do I care about the pins? I don't. They do their job without me telling them what to do.
With menus it's not that simple - I have to engage them; I have to obey them.
For an individual, Facebook's value is in the connections that people have formed on the site. If Facebook was down for a week, there'd be people searching confusedly for the next social platform That Everyone Uses.

Would Plus receive more traffic? Well, yeah. But so would Twitter and other social networks. My mom, for one, would return to sending email jokes instead of resharing Facebook stuff. She doesn't know what Google Plus is. I imagine a large number of other individuals are in the same boat.

Would people return to Facebook after a week? Assuming the connections between users aren't broken, I imagine so. It'd take more than a week to reconnect to that coworker from seven years ago, but who I still enjoy talking politics with about once a month.

So, in other words: Facebook's biggest asset is that it has a crapton of momentum. Keeps its one billion users on the site more and more is going to keep that momentum up. Switching from Facebook to the new thing would be more of a collective hassle than the demise of MySpace. That doesn't mean it won't happen, though.
Misleading analysis.

If nothing else, Facebook is obviously entertaining to many people, so this is a bit like arguing that entertainment has no value and we should just work all the time.

Wouldn't work itself be pointless in that case?
It says the source was random.org - probably the closest thing to 'true' random you're going to find freely available.
Curiosity makes first-ever check-in on Foursquare from Mars
Something roughly equivalent to:

s = set()
for e1 in edits1(word):
for e2 in edits1(e1):
s.add(e2)
Show HN: Weighted # of Lies from Each Candidate (Graph)
I tend to agree with you. (I actually started writing a defense of my initial position and realized that I was wrong!) I think some would like to dismiss the Apple ][ as, say, merely being the luckiest of a bunch of similarly conceived products that came out around the same time (e.g. the Commodore Pet was announced earlier but delivered later, and the TRS-80 came out slightly afterwards), but then not only was the Apple ][ more successful, it was also dramatically superior technically (e.g. its expansion bus allowed for self-configuring cards that could even slave the computer, which led to products like the DTACK 68k board that turned a humble Apple ][ into a workstation-class computer back in 1980.

http://www.easy68k.com/paulrsm/dg/
> You live in a crazy expensive neck of the woods? Nice to meet you; I live in Japan, cry me a river.

I was under the impression that things weren't too bad out in the inaka. Is Gifu that expensive compared to SF or NYC?
I don't necessarily buy into "Austrian" economics, but this guy is really engaging in a bit of a straw man here.

"When someone pays me, I receive the purchasing power of that money at that time, why shouldn’t I be entitled to that purchasing power in perpetuity? Well, because purchasing power is temporal; if a bubble bursts, or the economy dives, there is no reason at all why I should be able to buy the same basket of goods as I could at the top of the bubble."

Of course. That's not the point. The point is that there is a central authority that can manipulate the value of money and in so doing can favor of disfavor different players in the economy. It's also quite un-democratic. There are criticism of this from the left as well as the right. (For the life of me I've never been able to figure out why some on the left consider the existing Federal Reserve system progressive.)

The author also conflates libertarianism and conservatism, which isn't something you can just do with a hand-wave. The former is far more complex than that. He also tosses out red herrings about the 9/11 "truth" movement and similar things to achieve guilt by association.

Crummy article.
Why lifestyle design will make you miserable
#Internet2012: Winning the Fight for the Open Internet
Yes, this sort of living is pretty normal in climbing circles. I live in my truck part of each year while I'm on the road. I know guys who have been living in their vehicles for years, one guy for nearly two decades.
Sorry. I've heard the idea seriously proposed elsewhere.
10 things Steve Jobs taught us
lol. watching these logs is great.

you guys try some neat stuff to break things
I can't click on any links in the top 155px pixels of the window because of the cloud header (even when scrolled down, it remains fixed at a higher z-index).

OSX, Firefox 15.0.1
Link to Foursquare profile https://foursquare.com/marscuriosity
How [Linux] 3.6 nearly broke PostgreSQL
So if you pay for a premium car you have to support shit from some marketing idiot?
It makes cheaper cars look so much more attractive.
Say I have an original file: AAAAAAAAXAAAAAAA

If I split it into two files, $1 and $2 that look like this:
$1 - AAAAAAAA
$2 - AAAAAAA

I have now "saved" one byte by dropping the X.

The script "cat $1 printf "X" cat $0 exit" will combine those two files and reinsert the X, thus "decompressing" the data. Basically, he has replaced the byte "X", which counted towards the total size, with the EOF marker on the filesystem, which technically didn't count.

No space was actually saved, because he basically moved the information from the X character to metadata (the file splits).
Thanks! I went from a T61 to an MBP a few years back, but I do mostly .net development so I've been considering going back to a Lenovo. This is useful!
I'm interested to see how future generations perceive Facebook. For many in the current generation, Facebook became the place to reconnect with people they'd lost touch with since school ... sometimes a few years apart, but sometimes even longer. Today's children will grow up with those connections in-place. They won't need to re-connect because they'll always have been connected, so will it have the same appeal, or be used the same way?
There are supposed to be checks in place to stop things like credit card theft from having an immediate affect though. Cashiers should be asking for ID and checking your signature. It's actually a control that is supposed to occur in stores.

Someone grabs your phone and gets free meals? What controls are there on that interface?

I don't even have a dongle on my keys to unlock my car remotely. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Junior
Bien
Would that scale for someone who wanted to do an extended visit to the Bay Area? (say a month or so)

I'd like to visit San Francisco, but, apart from the US Visa and airfare, accomodation doesn't seem cheap (I haven't researched much but it comes up all the time here on HN). Food, oddly enough, sounds cheaper than in my 3rd world country.
The write limit should be lower than the read limit.
I would /never/ use an app that requested this functionality through Facebook.
Yep. My family spends ~2 months a year living in our VW van, travelling to various climbing areas.

Though I do enjoy our time on the road, I also really enjoy coming back to my home.
Quinzee makes energy management simple
Yup, thanks for pointing out this is essentially lower class tourism.
Image Compression and CSS Sprites – Web Developer Tools
The one bit of sugar in Python that always throws me off. Since the inner argument is written first in the comprehension, my intuition is that I'll add the iteration statements as I expand out to a slightly-higher loop. Nope!
He's on HN and posted his link :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4617792
How to fuck up with find
> and a copy of a utility bill

What a dumbass requirement. As if somebody with access to a printer would not be able to produce one.
"I think Jobs himself proved that software isn't art"

How so?

Also, I don't think it's too crazy to say that the toothbrush has had a larger effect on mankind than The Godfather.
Please explain how (1) is relevant to the complaint at hand.
As pointed out by others, the screw-up was not admitting that Apple Maps launched as an inferior product. The long-term benefits of a homegrown mapping product were very obvious, such as turn-by-turn and vector tiles.
Hello from SW 2nd...Shame I'm just find out about this now (2 hours to demo time). Will the video be archived online? I'd love to check it out over the weekend.
5 ways big data is transforming everyday life
Very relevant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Incomput...
You don't know what you're talking about. Usability is paramount. You would not be that found of idrive if it forced you through three menus to lower the windows.

Think about the cheap TV sets with no buttons. A ton of menus just to change the contrast.
Or microwave ovens unusable without manuals.

EDIT - What do I say cheap TV sets? All TV sets.
Disabling CSS (page style → none) lets you see the content that is already there, but hidden for some reason.
Look at it from the other side of things: how would you react if AirBnB weren't doing these checks?

If I'm staying somewhere, I'm leaving my luggage, and there's plenty of opportunities for stuff to go missing, whether in the middle night or otherwise.

That's just the petty crime aspect, leaving aside other opportunities for much more serious badness.

It's bad that their customer service failed you, but I'd much rather there was a tiny bit of hassle for people renting out apartments for the safety of those staying there.
This title is misleading. It should say Entertainment Weekly bound 1,000 issues with smartphones.
But this isn't an app, it's a blog post. And the content is already on the DOM (view source), it's just hidden for some reason.
My understanding is that he was going to replicate the results in a larger sample but the pharma industry got him fired before he could do this. The research is pretty convincing as is though when its viewed in the context of all the other research showing the same thing.

And in any event, it's the best research we have. The idea that SSRIs make people suicidal by eliminating their depression doesn't even make sense, because placebos are just as effective as SSRIs for treating depression but they don't cause an increase in suicidal ideation or actual suicides.
It's not, except to the extent that it might be hard to feel sorry for someone who is taking unfair advantage of his landlord and cotenants and then complaining about the poor customer service that he was provided when doing so.

Again though: it's not. It's a mostly orthogonal point.
I met Steve Roberts [1] at a conference when he was riding his bike around the country (pedal power). And he was living this life by choice. When I moved to the Bay Area it was in the midst of a huge recession (chip companies were dying, fabs were closing). I thought a bit about it, and wondered what it would be like.

I've always wondered if, when flying high, folks might put together a 'bug out plan' which included mobile accommodations.

[1] http://nomadness.com/
Beta-testing democracy: Reddit's plan to drop an open Internet on lawmakers
There have been a number of iterations of the iDrive and some may not be much good but mine works quite well because

1) There are 8 programmable buttons for radio stations/destinations and maybe some other things. They are numbered.

2) Steering wheel buttons for audio input selection and track/station up down and volume.

3) iDrive gestures of pushing and holding East for navigation and South for entertainment (I don't have a phone kit as I don't want to call while driving, that would be the North direction).

So I only need spin the iDrive for setting destinations or scrolling though the contents of the connected iPod. I find the iDrive with the mentioned shortcuts a much better concept for a car than a touchscreen (at until you can feel the screen content without looking).

I find a recent Mini much worse for missing the programmable buttons and possibly the hold to different compass bearings.
3D printers shape up to lead the next technology gold rush
News story about the boom in consumer 3D printer startups
I don't disagree with what you state but another important difference between the two is that the "boring biz" version mentioned Noah Kagan of Appsumo (semi)fame. Everybody on HN knows who Kagan is, Appsumo has been discussed in more than a few HN submissions over time. In addition Kagan was just in the HN frontpage and tech blogosphere about how he got canned from FB and lost out on $100 million. I think the "boring biz" article, by mentioning him in the first line, piggy-backed off his fame and credibility within the tech/startup community. In other words somebody did some name dropping (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Readers probably thought: "hmm, if Noah Kagan paid this thing some attention, maybe I should too."
A method for removing space debris
(1) is immaterial to the topic at hand, which is AirBnb's customer service and unresponsiveness. That is between OP and his/her landlord.

edit: nevermind, beaten to the punch.
Your comments always make me smile Thomas, you seem like the real life embodiment of the "Lawful Neutral" alignment, always following the letter of each rule. My lease allows subletting, but there may be a provision which I'm not following, I can double check.

If this post gets killed, that's fine. I was hesitant to write it, but I thought it might be valuable to share. There's a fine line between useful critique or sharing an experience and ranting/complaining, perhaps my post leaned too far to the latter.
Gamification’s Real-World Results
This is 100% PR. They are not going to make any kind of car out of this.
Just a question(maybe a stupid one,I don't know):
They all sell data,but who's buying all this data?
I don't know what balls to me too means.

Yes, if we're all trying to have a good time, we'd shoot heroin and be done with it. ;-) IMHO, we are group sharing to learn better ways to build startups, small businesses, and to better ourselves, co-workers, and companies with best practices - and to do it with fun and a twinkle in our eyes.

I did look at that wordmark comic -- I believe I ask a credible question: If complexity buys you nothing, then why make something complex? And, believe me, if you are thinking "Visitor" or "AbstractFactory" then I have already lost you. ;-)

Thank you for your comment about my C version. I wanted to make sure it was extensible and quite obvious -- because I write code to be read by humans as my 2nd goal (my first is that it works & meets the spec!). Knuth's Literate Programming taught me that. The other thing about that C solution is that it's simple and many people can understand it. One does not need to know the difference between a monad and a gonad to "get it".

My overall comment: Complexity: when required; otherwise, choose simple. Believe me, I have learned this lesson over and over again during my 45 years of programming.
I had this idea a while back to just travel the United States working on freelance ideas, but geeze...
> "except to the extent that it might be hard to feel sorry for someone who is taking unfair advantage of his landlord and cotenants"

The morality and ethics behind AirBnb is far from clearcut. The landlord-tenant relationship is also not so easily moralized - I'd take a flying leap off the high horse unless I knew more.
yeah this is a pretty classic example of what startups have to deal with: irrational customers.

the guy is getting $3k from a transaction that breaks all kind of rules, and is upset that a _SCAN_ of his Driver's License might be intercepted in a "man in the middle" attack on a sent email!?!?!?
def decompress(filesize, sha1hash, openingbits, closingbits):
for candidate in bits(filesize,openingbits):
if sha1(candidate) == sha1hash:
if candidate[-(len(closingbits)):] == closingbits:
return candidate
It is my unsubstantiated opinion that most rec. drugs act to increase any latent emotions or thoughts you are already experiencing. Alcohol certainly treats me that way.

Thus, since you were in an already stressful situation, I'm not surprised that K wasn't relaxing or pleasant.
But the challenge isn't to compress random strings, the challenge is to compress a specific random string. This means that given enough time, you should be able to come up with an algorithm or transformation that turns that specific string into something of lower entropy. I'm not saying this is very feasible, but it doesn't violate the pigeonhole principle.

For example, there is a fixed size algorithm to generate the digits of pi, even though pi is incompressible.
Justice Department Educates Foreign Judges on Piracy Issues
"Will programming still exist in 31 more years?"

Jeez, I hope we figure out an easier way of doing this by then. ;)
I'm extremely reluctant to take any advice from a site that includes an ad-laden splash-page before delivering a ~400 word article split over two pages.
"Glib is the word I would use, for romanticizing a scenario"

I would use glib in the same way that people romanticize people living in poverty. Particularly single moms with good kids living in the ghetto. Single mom works so hard holding down 3 jobs cleaning offices and her kids all work hard if only they were given a chance and didn't live in the projects. (Watch http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/ on netflix to see a little back story)

While that situation exists of course (and in fact I remember growing up commercials for the united negro college fund)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfwpeHzc8ks

...most likely in reality (drive through any poor neighborhood) there is something else going on that produces the behavior that is observed.
I have seen people photoshop utility bills, proof of insurance, etc.

Requirements like this are hilarious.
Can't make the indentation behave. Don't know why.
Woops! I could have sworn I clicked that link as well. I must have visited the Features page. Thanks for helping out. I'll take a look.
Mars rover gets to play in the sand
Only colloquially. Light in general spans the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Even I am a staunch anti Apple proponent but I have to sit back and applaud what Steve has achieved and what an incredibly visionary and accomplished man he was, I wish I could live like he had.

The video was a frank reminder that we had lost a great man.
but the script is longer than the one byte that he saves, right? So the total is greater than the original file.

That's where I'm getting confused.
Suing Samsung was Jobs' legacy. He was planning to do it himself if he lived long enough. He was incredibly petty, especially for an intellectual property thief.
Spelling error, second paragraph. Irony.
New Google+ Hangout App lets CG artists design review 3D content
Invest in the Band Members, Not Their Music
Oh look. Another blog post decrying the evils of facebook that is in reality saying "I don't like facebook, therefor it offers no value whatsoever to anyone else," like it's some universal truth.

A lot of hacker/geek types seem 1. to hate facebook and 2. to be unable to empathize with anyone who doesn't share their dogmatic technological beliefs. Can we stop this already? Most people on facebook enjoy using it. Most people on facebook get tons of value from it. Most people on facebook aren't on reddit or hacker news, so they get a lot of new content from things lifted from those sites and posted to facebook. I don't understand why it eats at people so much that other people enjoy something they don't like.

This is just a cynical blog post by someone angry that something he doesn't like is popular.
And a more recent summary: The New Cloud Haskell, http://www.well-typed.com/blog/70

Compared to the previous prototype:

* it is much faster;

* it can run on multiple kinds of network;

* has backends to support different environments (like cluster or cloud);

* has a new system for dealing with node disconnect and reconnect;

* has a more precisely defined semantics;

* supports composable, polymorphic serialisable closures;

* and internally the code is better structured and easier to work with.
I'm sorry you felt like I was rebutting the complaint with the landlord thing. I'm not.
This picture is worth a thousand pictures
Airbnb should have a phone number that people who are renting out their homes can call 24/7 for help, advice etc. If they do have this why didn't the author use it?
But the document checks weren't finished yet and the guest still arrived. At this point, they're not really protecting the guest.
TL;DR: One article converted because they were talking about and pitching their service throughout the whole piece (4 calls to action), while the other was about their experience of hiring family members with no real discussion or pitches about their business (0 calls to action).

Duh?
It must've been improved recently then. I am going off circa 2007 3-series version here. Thanks for the update.
The advantage, to me, is that you focus on the behavior of the application rather than the code. I have a tendency to get off-track when I'm coding and I'll start on refactors that, in hindsight, were a terrible idea.

Very much the same for me; I'm much like Lenny from "Memento" at times ("now what was I doing?"); add to this that reproducing the bug is essentially what you are doing by writing a regression test for it. Also it falls in line with TDD as applied to maintenance (keep coding until all the tests pass). One last thing: it's kind of a wash with VC these days (and reverting, as the GP said), but if you fix the bug first, are you certain your test is catching it? I like to have a piece of code that I can say "yes, when I do this, my code fails; now to fix it."
Yes, I see why a repetition/pattern approach wouldn't work, but I'm proposing something else: That the file may be generated by an algorithm, in the way one generates the digits of pi using an algorithm.

It's similar to how if I suspected he had generated his random file with a mersenne twister I could simply guess his seed and reproduce the file from it. (Though, I realize now this is an NP-hard problem)
And if I weren't upset with it, someone else on the internet would be calling me stupid and telling me I deserved it when my identity was stolen or some account was compromised because I was sending things over unencrypted email. Some days I guess you just can't win.

Again though, issue number 1 is unresponsive, unhelpful technical support.